Jim Kearns, a career manual labourer, struggles to overcome stifling cynicism brought on by missed opportunities and mid-life discord – then he loses his job for punching out a Hollywood action star in a bizarre job-site confrontation. In an effort to salvage not only Jim’s sanity but also their unravelling family, his wife, Maddy, assigns him a series of life-affirming tasks to complete while he suffers through unemployment and his fifteen minutes of fame. Through the pages of his journal, we get an often humorous and sometimes touching view of one man’s life journey. At once compelling and hilarious, The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns is the most refreshing novel of the 2005.
Moving with her mother from Vancouver to Wells, British Columbia, Elizabeth Connell longs for the excitement of the city and her father, brother, and friends left behind. While she is in the peaceful graveyard of nearby Barkerville she finds a small gold ring that has very special powers. By twisting the ring on her finger, Elizabeth is transported to the nineteenth century during the heyday of the gold rush. Caught between her present life with family and friends and a love in the past, Elizabeth learns more than history.
Short-listed for the 2007 Ottawa Book Award for Fiction When 17-year-old Rigg and his friend Ari hang a marauding wolf in the wilds of medieval Greenland, they get much more than they bargained for: a hint of werewolves, glimpses of human sacrifice to the old Norse gods, and an encounter with a resourceful native girl that changes their lives forever. This adventure brings Rigg and Ari into conflict with Rigg’s grandfather, Erik the Red, the ruler of the Greenland Norse colony, and with his daughter, Freydis, skilled in black magic. Rigg must fight a mysterious warrior known only as Death Watcher and lead a dangerous expedition to rescue his father, Leif Eriksson. Based on history and Viking beliefs and customs, Viking Terror is a striking tale of conflict between young and old, pagan and Christian, Norse settlers and Greenland natives. The skill and courage of Rigg and Ari are pitted against strong and wily adversaries, with the survival of the new Norse colony in Greenland at stake.
Ultimatum 2 is an action-packed, fast-moving saga. The American president is fed up with the hundreds of millions of dollars given to Russia to clean up high-level nuclear waste. His solution is to give the Russians an ultimatum: do this my way, or else! It is delivered in person by the secretary of state during a secret rendezvous in Norway. A second ultimatum follows from the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom to the government of Canada, after they decide that an international nuclear waste disposal site should be created in Canada. The Canadian prime minister tells their emissary there’s no way Canada will become a nuclear waste dump. The Americans threaten to invade. How the matter is resolved is ingenious.
While camping in Ontario’s Algonquin Park with their fathers, best friends Dani and Caitlin spend the night by themselves at an isolated site on Canoe Lake, rumoured to be the favourite spot of the famous Canadian painter Tom Thomson. After a sleepless night, the girls are stunned by the appearance of a ghostly canoe drifting towards the shore. Is this really the ghost of Tom Thomson, the creator of The Jack Pine and West Wind ?
Short-listed for the 2002 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel Dr. Rebecca Temple has just returned to practice in an old converted house in the Kensington Market area of Toronto, six months after the death of her artist husband, when she’s confronted with the violent murder of a patient she had earlier diagnosed as paranoid. Sylvia Warsh’s accomplished first novel explores the decades-old deceptions and plots that go back to World War Two Poland and underlie the murder of Goldie. Even as Rebecca struggles with guilt over the misdiagnosis which may have led to her patient’s death, she becomes the killer’s next target.
At the dawn of the twentieth century a disparate group of travellers are thrown together in the Caucasus Mountains, fabled land of Argonauts, Amazons, and Cossacks. Henry Norman, a British Member of Parliament and author, teams up with Canadian radio pioneer and amateur archaeologist Reginald Fessenden and Katherine Waddell, the lover of Fessenden's dead friend, Ottawa poet Archibald Lampman. Each has a question. Fessenden seeks physical confirmation of the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, and the Great Flood. Norman, ever the detached observer, is after material for a new book but gets more than he bargained for. Waddell pursues some elusive realm where she can find solace for her grief over Lampman and perhaps, like Fessenden, a glimpse of Paradise. Along for the carriage ride through the remote Caucasus is Pushkin-loving Sergei, a rowdy, irreverent Georgian guide and interpreter. There are many views from Mount Tamischeira, legendary spot from which the Deluge of Deluges was first witnessed, but for this band of latter-day Argonauts, peering into one's heart may be the most challenging prospect.
A story of three Buddhist monks based on a traditional Chinese folk tale about cooperation. Without cooperation, one monk can fetch two buckets of water, two monks will only be able to fetch one bucket of water, and three monks will fetch no water at all.
Nick Slovak is put in charge of a hot immigration investigation when he learns that his partner, immigration officer Walter Martin, is dead and the killer has escaped. Nick’s investigation turns up a trail of unsavoury evidence: organized crime, a billion dollar smuggling operation, and government corruption at the highest levels. As his world is turned upside down, he is forced to confront the painful truth about Grace Wang-Weinstein, the woman he loves. Grace, a brilliant young immigration judge, finds herself a suspect in the murder investigation. At the same time, she is handed the biggest case of her career, and pitched into a web of intrigue. Caught between her political masters, the police and the cold-eyed killers of an immigration officer, she must confront the past in order to unravel the truth – that one of her friends is not what he seems to be.
Architect and single mother Emily Harada has structured a well-ordered existence around her work restoring historic houses and the parenting of her teenage son, Jesse. But her carefully laid foundation cracks when she develops a nagging ache in her shoulder, has her architectural integrity questioned, and feels shut out by Jesse's assertions of independence. What she doesn't need right now – or does she? – are the romantic attentions of a former student, an attractive but much younger man. Or for an old acquaintance to resurface with questions about a Bronze Age artifact that Emily might have, uh, stolen, once upon a time, in her youth. Emily, her son, and the 2,000-year-old artifact all come of age in this funny and moving novel about motherhood, middle age, and one woman's attempt to restore herself to a state of grace that combines the best elements of past and present, old and new.